Preparing for Jobs in Your Free Time
The purpose of this section in particular is your off-campus and otherwise extracurricular activities. Here's a list of activities that will help you in your long term job search/career goals:
Make a LinkedIn account if you don't have one. If you do, be active on it. Our documentation provides how to set up an ideal LinkedIn account and ways to use it for a job search.
Make a Glassdoor, Indeed and other job search sites account, so you can see what actual jobs are open around NYC.
Use Meetup.com. You can start by searching the "tech" category in NYC and sorting by calendar. I find that sorting by calendar is much better than looking through groups that may or may not be active.
Also look at EventBrite or Gary's Guide for tech events.
Keep an eye out for Hackathons once you've done some basic projects. We highly advise attending at least a couple hackathons this summer.
Join CUNY 2X Newsletter and Calendar for information.
Review our coding challenges page for coding challenge websites like Hackerrank.
Read articles. Our top recommended sites are Medium.com, Hackernoon.com, Dev.to, and any industry engineering blogs you may want to follow. Review the companies you are interested in to see if they have engineering focused blogs on their technologies- for example, Etsy's Code as Craft, Spotify Labs, Uber Engineering, LinkedIn Engineering; prominent companies usually have one, so feel free to google as well.
Throughout the year, you should focus on and keep in mind:
Core CS skills learned in your CS courses.
Co-curricular industry-focused skills learned on your own through materials and workshops to supplement your academic curriculum. Sign up for the CUNY 2X Newsletter and Calendar for suggestions.
Reading articles and attending seminars related to current industry trends and tools, the NYC tech industry and job market, etc. in order to better understand what skills you need and what your career options are.
Software development projects to build your tech portfolio and give you experience building finished projects. This is also a good opportunity to develop teamwork and communication skills, as well as practice discussing and presenting your work.
Attending professional tech events where you can talk to engineers about the topics you're hopefully now familiar with.
Preparing to apply for jobs or internships by the beginning of the Fall Semester (aka "peak hiring season" in tech). This involves updating and editing your résumé, then having it professionally reviewed; putting the finishing touches on your portfolio; updating LinkedIn; and attending mock interviews (both behavioral and tech interviews).
Full list of our Job Search and Interview Information
You can find a full list of all the pages on the Handbook here....